Handicapping PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012

Every year for the last six years, about a week before PEOPLE Magazine announces the Sexiest Man Alive, I handicap the contenders, and ultimately make a prediction. If you’d like to see what that looks like, click here for the 2011 feature and here for 2010. PEOPLE will announce the 2012 SMA next week. So today, if it were any other year, I would be breaking down the candidates’ chances and declaring the top pick based on the best odds.

But I’m not.

Because, well, and you’ll have to excuse the gloat, I already called it a LONG time ago, as early as LAST NOVEMBER! Click here for a refresher, and here, and here for the follow-ups. As I noted in July, when I wrote that George Clooney was passing on the SMA torch to Channing Tatum (click here to revisit that post), there’s no need to bother with listing all the possibilities. It’s a waste of energy and resources. And there are no other possibilities. Not this year.

Gossip Cop reported yesterday that it’ll be Channing Tatum. PEOPLE would not comment on the story. Please. It’s done. With the year he’s had/having, it was done back in May. We’ll discuss Tatum’s, um, achievement when he’s properly confirmed as the Sexiest Man Alive but I will say this for now -- his reign will certainly be a more successful one than Bradley Cooper’s, which is what happens when you give it to the guy who came in 2nd place.

Another good sign that it will be Tatum is that he’s been keeping a pretty low profile the last couple of months. Very few sightings, very few photographs. That’s the deal, right? You go underground until you resurface as the Sexiest Man Alive. Here’s Channing Tatum with his wife at the opening of his bar Saints & Sinners in New Orleans in early October.